each player is a sentient starship, one of a fleet of potentially self replicating ships sent out to colonize and explore.
players compete or cooperate for ressources in a new planetary system, trying to build a copy of themselves.

each ship starts with the ability to build the necceassary factories and so on, but not more.

different ships can adopt themselves to areas nearer or farther away from the sun, to mining from gas giants or asteroids or planets, they could work for their keep and reproduction or just try to rob the others.

Of course, this plot would need a decent "crafting" system and must be able to believable picture 3D-Space.

Robot society
This could be a variant or aspect of the scenario above.
Palyers are robots, either crawling over the graves of an extinguished humanity, or maybe exploring and exploiting a distant planet.

There are vastly different body shapes, functions and so on, with players beeingable to change drastically over their lifetime.

In a post-apocalyptic scenario, basic plots could evolve around scavenging the rare and complicated spare parts needed to sustain ones mtallic chassis, or maybe even to preocreate.

In an distant exploration scenario, different robot factions sent by different human factions might compete to gather knowledge and ressources to send home.

These scenarios would need to plausibly simulate vastly different body shapes, sizes and abilities, as well as different environments

Additional fun in both scenarios could stem from the players trying to figure out ways how robots would function socially, how they would form relationships, and so on.

That last idea for sentient ships by martin was pretty cool too, I like it.

Anyway I've been thinking recently of muds with two sides, like kingdom vs. kingdom games with black and white sides. It seems like there's more you can do with this idea of two factions than just PvP.

My idea is called Murder Ballad. It takes place in a 1700s European-like setting, a city like London and surrounding countryside. There are two sides: doers, and tellers.

The role of the doers is to play out tragic stories involving NPCs. The reasons for these stories are various and depend on the situation the doer is put into. It could be a death of a loved one, a murder of an employer that has wronged them, a revenge killing of a man who's killed one of your kin, and so on.

The role of the teller is to discover the circumstances of these stories by exploration and investigation.

Each time a player logs in they can play out a ballad either as a doer or a teller. They can have up to a certain number of ballads in their player account; if they wish to play a new one they have to drop an old one. They can alter their character details if they wish with new ballads.

They build up NPC acquaintances through these ballads, and they can later go back to see what's happened to them as the result of new ballads by other players.

If you abandon a ballad in the middle of it you lose out on character bonuses, customizations, upgrades/unlocks, etcetera.

Players can praise their favorite ballads, which bestow additional bonuses on the player-doer that created it and the teller that uncovered it. This gives an incentive to create interesting ballads.

The result is an evolving song-cycle of the history of the NPCs and the setting, with the players alternating between doers of the deeds and tellers (those who bring the deeds to light).

Anyway I've been thinking recently of muds with two sides, like kingdom vs. kingdom games with black and white sides. It seems like there's more you can do with this idea of two factions than just PvP.

Nice idea! A recent mud advert got me thinking about how it would be amusing to have a "Pirates vs Ninjas" mud, but I fear the effort would far exceed the brief novelity factor. But here are a couple of suggestions for kingdom vs. kingdom themes that avoid traditional PvP:

Set in the caves below the rocky sea-island of Fraggle Rock, the gameplay revolves around the daily conflict between the carefree Fraggles (coloured humanoid creatures about 18 inches tall) and the hard-working Doozers (pudgy green humanoids about 6 inches tall).

The Doozers earn points for constructing scaffolding in an empty area, while the Fraggles earn points for eating the scaffolding (thus freeing an area for new construction). The result is a form of "kingdom vs. kingdom" game, except that the two sides actually help each other earn points instead of trying to harm each other, resulting in a form of symbiotic relationship.

Vampire hunters

The basic objective is simple - the humans and vampires have to kill each other. But there's a twist: the vampires are extremely strong and fast, therefore during the night the humans are forced to hide. However the vampires fall into a coma-like sleep during the day, and are therefore also forced to hide. Thus the two sides effectively take turns at hunting and hiding, with the defenders often setting up intricate traps in their hidden lairs rather than fighting in traditional PvP combat.

A problem with many "kingdom vs. kingdom" games is players creating spies on the other side. In this theme that isn't a problem - in fact, it's considered part of the game! Some vampires have human pets who'll happily sell out their friends, just as some vampires will betray their own kind to reduce the competition. Thus if you wish to survive (as either human or vampire) you need to be extremely paranoid - the more people who know where your secret hiding place is located, the greater the chance that the other side will be tipped off. But this is balanced against the advantages of sharing resources with other players, as multiple players can create a far more secure hideout than one player on their own.

Until few centuries ago, there was no widespread racism in the modern sense, for example Native Americans that converted to chatolizism could become noblemen in spain. Let's extend that idea to fantasy MU* with diverse player races.

In most MU* you have one religion, with several gods of differing degrees of good and evil, and players chosse to worship morgoth or the valar or whatever. Now, let's assume that there is a pletora of religions, all of them disagreeing on their basic quetions of morals, and ho created the world, and so on. People define themselves not by wether they believe in Zeus or Venus, but wether they believe in the greek panthenon, or are shiites, or calvinists, or catholics, or mystics, maybe atheist, or crypto-jews ...

In most games with several playable races, some have a tinge of evil, some one of goodness. Think orcs and elves. On the other hand, players want to pick and choose their race, and want to mingle with others. Think orcs drinking with elves. With religion as the defining paradigm, you could have a pretext for mor mixed societies, while at the same time you have lines along which conflict can erupt.

Such a system would need several religions, with their histories, schisms, prophets, prejudices and so on. Plots can evolve around (sides the usual fantasy shenannigans) cruades, inter and innerreligios strife, new sects, and so on.

To help players to truly think of all chars in terms of religion, you would need a few systems to help them.
One is a dresscode system, that matches certain wearables with religions. If a mob or PC is following one dresscode, short descs include is probable belief:
A male Orc with huge warts on his face, wearing the garments of a fellow protestant, is standing here.
An elven woman with a lean face, dressed like an ottoman heathen, is sitting on a chair by the bar.
The apparant religion of a char influences the reacions he gets from mobs, from lynchings over "we don't deal with your kind" to "hello there, fellow christian! let's worship together and share a meal!"

You would need a few coded emotes for greetings, prayers, blessings and so on for day to day talk, plus a system that tells the player if his char knows from what belief a certain phrase comes:
you type: pray thanksgiving
someone else sees either:
Leandor folds his hands and praises the lord for the meal
or:
Leandor folds his hands and mutters some heathen prayer

Lastly, you would need a system that allows players to cuickly check what their religion say about certain topics. Kinda like help, but geared towards the knowledge of the char, and optimized for a quick lookup:
believe food
No meat on mondays, no booze, don't mix fish fish and fruit because or prohet died of that.
believe kuusht
the kuusht are heathens, who consort with demons, steal and hang around their bathing houses, instead of working. Always check your purse after meeting one. Their prayers are spells with which they try to bewwich believers, when around them make sure they don't practice their heathen ways.

Until few centuries ago, there was no widespread racism in the modern sense, for example Native Americans that converted to chatolizism could become noblemen in spain. Let's extend that idea to fantasy MU* with diverse player races.

@ malaprop: Hardy Har Har. I was refering to modern, "scientific" racism. But this would be a scholarly debate that we don' need here. If people just follow the idea and maybe turn it into something, I'm happy.

Two more ideas:

Moving RP-Hub / Endless Voyage / Ghengis Khan
The "location" - cal it convoy - from where all the stuff, exploration and quests happen, is moving. Picture Battlestar Galactica, or the Horde of Ghenigs Khan. Up ahead, new towns/planets pop into range, get closer, exploration, adventure and/or conquest happen.
The farther ahead one ventures, the bigger the danger and rewards. Weak mobs and boring treasure should respawn rather slowly, or not at all, when the convoy approaches. So strong players, who dare to venture ahead, get fresh areas with strong mobs, players who wait a bit for this area to come into range will deal with only the lesser mobs, get less treasure and maybe have more infrastructure to aid them.
One twist could be to have a pursuing kingdom, with the possibility of player vs. player between them. The pursued can be a pillaging horde or innocent refugees, or maybe innocent refugees who resort to pillaging because they don't find the time to settle down.

While it would be easy to have giant space craft, or fleet of ships as a convoy, building a convincing mongol horde that doubles as a city (just, youknow, a city on horseback) could be hard.
The blood and bone of such a system, however, would be a terraforming alghorithm that spits out exciting new areas at a high rate. Normal, painstaking area building wouldn't work with such a game.

Zombie Apocalypse
Kingdom vs. Kingdom: In a post apocalyptic world, humans struggle for survival while zombies try to eat their braaains. Humans are smart, weak, can craft and cooperate, while zombies can't speak and have a rather limited set of emotes. They eat brains, and get stronger and quicker doing so. Zombies can't use tools, maybe the don't even recognize them.
human plots revolve around protecting themselves, foraging for goods in zombie infested cities and roleplaying lots of angst and terror. Zombies get happy hack'n slash a plenty.
Players should choose which side they are on, I think permadeath would make the whole splatter-plot far funnier. Part of the experience of a dead character is transfered to thi plaers new one, so the permadeath is't so frustrating. If the game mechanics allow a human to become a zombie, expereince (braaains!) he accumulates as a zombie should transfer to his next human character: So he is rewarde for really playing a mean ombie, one that turns on his former comrades at first opportunity.

In most MU* you have one religion, with several gods of differing degrees of good and evil, and players chosse to worship morgoth or the valar or whatever. Now, let's assume that there is a pletora of religions, all of them disagreeing on their basic quetions of morals, and ho created the world, and so on. People define themselves not by wether they believe in Zeus or Venus, but wether they believe in the greek panthenon, or are shiites, or calvinists, or catholics, or mystics, maybe atheist, or crypto-jews ...

The potential problem with that in a typical MUD's high-fantasy setting is that, in such a setting, the existence of gods and god-like creatures is not a matter of belief, but simply a matter of observation. In real-life all genuine religions contain an element of faith. The very existence of a particular god (let alone his precise nature) is something that one has to choose to believe; one cannot simply visit Mount Olympus and watch the gods in action in order to verify empirically that they're there. But in a fantasy setting the gods are immediately, demonstrably real - to doubt their existence would be like questioning the existence of Barrack Obama - you may not agree with anything he has to say, but you can't reasonably claim that he's imaginary.

For this idea to work, I suspect you'd have to set the MUD in something other than the typical high-fantasy setting - which is not necessarily a bad thing, but something to bear in mind.

martin wrote:

Moving RP-Hub / Endless Voyage / Ghengis Khan
The "location" - cal it convoy - from where all the stuff, exploration and quests happen, is moving. Picture Battlestar Galactica, or the Horde of Ghenigs Khan. Up ahead, new towns/planets pop into range, get closer, exploration, adventure and/or conquest happen.
The farther ahead one ventures, the bigger the danger and rewards. Weak mobs and boring treasure should respawn rather slowly, or not at all, when the convoy approaches. So strong players, who dare to venture ahead, get fresh areas with strong mobs, players who wait a bit for this area to come into range will deal with only the lesser mobs, get less treasure and maybe have more infrastructure to aid them.

A vital question to ask when considering any game feature is "how will griefers abuse this?" The notion of having a MUD which effectively has no respawns strikes me as a griefers' paradise - just think of the fun to be had if you're a 733t haX0r doodz - zoom through the advance area slaughtering every single thing in sight, and no other player will ever have anything to kill, or have any way to advance, and thus will never be able to level up enough to be able to stop you from doing it.

The PCs are paranormal investigators and monster hunters - think of something along the lines of the X-Files or Supernatural TV series, or the Call of cthulhu roleplaying game, or perhaps even Ghostbusters.

The game world is split into multiple sections, called 'scenes', each of which are connected through transportation-specific exits; walk, cycle, car, train or plane. Not all scenes are directly connected to each other, so to travel a long distance you might to have drive (or catch a taxi) to the airport, then catch a plane, then take a train journey at the other end. From a mechanical perspective these all work the same, effectively teleporting you from one scene to another, but the mechanics would be hidden behind pretty cosmetic messages. In this way the game world can cover any parts of the real world you like, without having to literally map out the entire world.

UFO / X-Com / Mars Attacks / Plan 9 from outter space

Gameplay works as described by KaVir. Players are either aliens, bent on exploring and maybe enslaving the earth, or humans. Alien plots may revolve around abducting cattle or people, doing field research on earth, trying to control earth leaders, recovering aline atifacts in the hands of humans and maybe preparing their invasion. Certain alien missions, e.g. cattle abductions, will start a scene for the humans to investigate.
Humans investigate, either as journalists, government employees, conspiracy nuts or maybe enraged farmers who want to shut down this cattle hustling flying saucer business.
None of the factions are homogenus, and each person has to investigate his own side as much as the other side. Some aliens will be bent on enslaving the earth, and some human factions will want to collaborate, for a share of the power. Some will just want to research the other side, some will try to work towards an agreement of sort. On both sides, there will be strong factions tyring to supress the news about the aliens, hunting down those who want to spill the beans.